Day: December 21, 2025

“The Lord is at hand”

Last week, we thought about the questions of Advent in terms of the witness of John the Baptist and Mary, Virgin and Mother. The questions of Advent articulate an essential feature of our humanity, namely, the desire to know. Questions are not about doubting, negating, or undermining knowledge but about seeking to know more fully; in short, to understand. What we are being challenged to understand and enter into its meaning is nothing less than the motions of God’s love coming to us in the pageant of the Word.

Advent shows its meaning. It is the redemption of our humanity but that only makes sense in the awareness of sin and darkness, of evil and wickedness, not just in our troubled world – “the distress of nations”, the vagaries of natural catastrophes, “the sea and the waves roaring”, our mental anxieties, neuroses, and fears, “men’s hearts failing them for fear”, as we heard on The Second Sunday in Advent. In the face of such things we are shown what God seeks for our humanity: “the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them. And blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me,” Jesus says, which we heard last Sunday. It is a vision of wholeness and completeness, of the restoration of our humanity to its truth and being as found in God. We can, it seems, only come to this understanding through questions: our questions and the questions of God to us. Both belong to our learning and to the active form of our engagement with what is to be known, lived, and, above all, loved.

The questions of Advent, whether we start with the question of Jesus to John’s disciples in the Gospel in the Canadian BCP for The Sunday Next Before Advent – “what seek ye?”, or whether we begin with the question of the whole city about Jesus’ triumphal yet humble entry into Jerusalem, “who is this?” on The First Sunday in Advent. Or whether we then examine the implicit questions on The Second Sunday in Advent, namely, what are the Scriptures and what are they for? Not to mention, what do they teach? Or whether we ask with John the Baptist in the prison of our experiences, “Art thou he that should come or do we seek for another?” Or the questions of Jesus to the multitude in the wilderness about John the Baptist, “what went ye for to see?”, all on The Third Sunday in Advent. In all of these we are presented with the desire to know and to learn.

In our Advent meditations on Wisdom Literature, we learn that “the fear of the Lord,” as Job puts it in a famous passage, “is wisdom, and to depart from evil is understanding” or as Proverbs and the Psalms put it, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. Wisdom itself complements this by noting that “the beginning of wisdom is the most sincere desire for instruction, and concern for instruction is love of [wisdom].” And why? Because of another theme in the Wisdom Literature, immortality. This speaks to the ultimate truth and dignity of our humanity as made in the image of God. As Ecclesiastes says, “God has put eternity into our minds”, even though we experience everything “under the sun” as vanity and emptiness considered in itself. Yet it points us to what is above and beyond the mundane; in short, to God. “Fear God and keep his commandments for this is the whole duty of man”. As Wisdom says in the face of human evil, “God created man for incorruption, and made him in the image of his own eternity.”

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